J. H. Sked Page 4

  He concentrated so hard on the course he had to take that he was in front of the tube station before he realized it, and stopped dead centre before the single step into the entrance, and the decrepit tiling that led into the station foyer.

  The step was a dark, horrid green that oozed across Charlie’s mind and reminded him of the time Nana had forgotten about the leftover soup in the fridge.

  “Na-asty,” he whispered to himself, reflexively covering his nose and mouth as he stepped right over it, then shambled into the dingy space beyond it.

  The area just up until the turnstile was lit – barely – by neon strip lights, flickering beneath a layer of grime and dead flies that pressed in shadowed drifts against the plastic panels.

  Charlie turned his troubled gaze to the corners, where shadows fused wall and floor together and sparks of copper stared hungrily back.

  Dim, he thought, miserably, and eased Nana’s travel card out of the little pouch on Donald’s tummy.

  It took a few minutes for his large fingers to grasp the flimsy cardboard in its protective sheath, and in the end, his hands now slippery with dismay, he tugged too hard and split the plastic, the jagged edge slicing across the knuckle of his thumb.

  Charlie poked the edge of the ticket into the waiting mouth of the machine, then stuck his stinging thumb into his mouth and sucked at the wound.

  The turnstile beeped impatiently, and Charlie flinched at the crimson burst and snatched up the card from where it quivered testily in its new slot, scurrying through the opening paddles and into the embrace of the brighter lights at the lift beyond.

  He could hear the steady rumble of the machine as it ascended from the platforms below, a self-satisfied growl like a well-fed but cranky cat, and looked at the hateful square in his hand, before forcing it hastily back into its cover. His injured thumb throbbed in time to the rising of the elevator.

  “Bastard,” he whispered, and then clapped a hand over his mouth in horror, waiting for the wrath of Nana to descend about his ears, before remembering she couldn’t hear him.

  Ba-astard, he mouthed again, feeling it roll around his mouth like rich cream. Baa-

  The lift doors rolled open ponderously, and he closed his mouth firmly and peered inside. The lights glaring down from the roof chased any resemblance of shadow away, bouncing off the brightly frantic poster adverts and magic marker graffiti.

  Charlie wrapped his hands around Donald and stepped warily into the box, and tried not to whimper as the doors trumpeted their harsh warning before closing.

  He held onto Donald all the way down, feeling the soothing lump of Nana’s Secret Weapon nestling in the duck’s rump.

  All he had to do was stick his hand in, and the tips of his fingers would brush the cheap yellow plastic, dance across the cold metal tops of his Spare Ammunition.

  Three

  Charlie had sat cross-legged beside her chair, his buttocks slowly going numb as the cold infiltrated the thin carpet beneath him, and Nana had tilted his chin up towards her.

  He had been close to tears by then, bottom lip quivering with the effort of not weeping aloud.

  “Now, lad,” she said firmly. “You remember how to play soldier, Charlie?”

  “Soldier!” He clapped his hands, gleefully. Until very recently, they had played this game once a week, Nana creating tunnels and hideouts amidst the lounge furniture, from which they ambushed each other armed with laughter and water-pistols.

  It usually ended with Nana taking him prisoner and tickling him until he howled for mercy.

  “You know I can’t play soldier with you anymore, Charlie?”

  He nodded and scowled at the void beside her chair, lip beginning to flutter once more, and she turned his face back towards her hastily.

  “You can still be a soldier, Charlie. And I’ll be your – your commanding officer, and send you on a mission.”

  Charlie thought about this for a minute.“Kick the not-sees arse, what ho?” he said in a surprisingly plummy voice.

  He wasn’t sure what a not-see was – he thought it was a fancy way of saying blindfold, but it had been Nana’s favourite war cry.

  Nana hesitated, then chuckled huskily. “Exactly. And to do that, Charlie lad, you need my secret weapon.”

  She leant forward and plucked the yellow cylinder from the drawer.

  Nana showed him several times how to load up, unscrewing the base and tipping the silver tubes into the palm of her hand.

  “Now you try it,” she instructed, and made him do it several times until she was sure he had it right.

  Four

  The elevator jerked and bumped to an unsteady halt, and Charlie inhaled deeply and stepped out between the rattling doors, then shuffled steadily down the short corridor until he reached the platform.

  He stood with his back pressed tightly against the dirty yellow wall, like clotted cream infested with raisins from a bitter harvest, and would not look at the gaping black maw just a few steps away.

  “Your mission starts on the platform, waiting for the train,” he repeated to himself, but the words didn’t sound the way they had when Nana had said them, leaning earnestly towards him.

  “Take the train for five stops. Get off the train. Go to the hospital. Get your medicine. Come home.”

  It didn’t sound simple at all.

  He felt the horrid lump of the inhaler in the bag, resting snugly next to the torch, and wished he dared to snatch it out and throw it into the darkness where it belonged. The inhaler was light grey, but it was dim, and that was the hardest thing of all; each time he used it, he felt a part of himself get sucked into the bleak vacuum of the canister, even as the relief blasted into his strangling lungs.

  Sometimes he thought he saw bright sparks, glowing in the bottom of the tube, but not even Danny could get in there.

  Aaaah.

  The tunnel exhaled in anticipation of the train’s arrival, and Charlie jumped and clutched even harder at Donald, squeezing blue and yellow and white together in a dismayed handful of soft cloth and velcro.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and felt the shuddering breeze of the tube’s entrance across his hot and sweating face, heard the gasp and hiss of the doors recoiling from each other.

  Oh, Nana, he thought, miserably. Must I?

  And her voice, his commanding officer, irrevocable in the orders given:

  “Take the train for five stops. Get off the train. Go to the hospital. Get your medicine. Come home.”

  Charlie opened his eyes.

  Five

  He stepped into the carriage and hesitated, one huge foot still an inch away from the ground, until an impatient finger stubbed him in the back and he shuffled hastily to one side.

  A young man adorned with chains and a fringe dyed mouldy green squeezed past him, leather jacket creaking, and slumped scowling into the nearest seat.

  Charlie reached out and grasped the centre pole, then released it instantly. It had seemed to pulse beneath his hand, as though he’d grasped the artery of a living thing.

  The snarl of the doors behind him warned of the train’s departure, and he moved hastily down the narrow passage between the seats, scuttling past the punk, a businessman enraptured by his sheet of newsprint, and two cawing, shrieking teenage girls, who had broken off their conversation to stare at him and snigger loudly as he negotiated his course.

  Finally he reached a seat with empty space on both sides, and subsided gratefully out of their attention span, their shouted conversation as indecipherable to him as the chatter of Nana’s old parakeet.

  The metal tube shook and rattled and roared down the gullet of the tunnel, and Charlie groped miserably at Donald, fingers feeling once more for the solid comfort of the torch secreted beneath the cloth.

  The carriage was uncomfortably hot, a strange meaty stench exuding from the patterns that crawled like crippled insects over the empty seats. Charlie wished he could take his cap off, feeling the pinpricks of heat erupt over his scalp, but
if he did he was almost sure to loose it, and Nana had knitted it specially for him.

  He inched a broad forefinger beneath the wool, trying to scratch without messing his hair up, and found that the parts he couldn’t reach itched even harder. Sighing, he tucked both hands beneath his chin, resting them on Donald’s jaunty blue cap, and let the rancid heat wash over him in a smelly, unavoidable wave.

  The businessman got off at the next stop, leaving his paper on the seat behind him, and was replaced by a woman in a bright red trouser-suit two sizes too small and matching lipstick, and an elderly man wearing a skull-cap and an incredibly bushy grey beard.

  The doors slammed shut in the face of a mother dragging a squalling toddler by the arm, and most of the passengers breathed a sigh of relief.

  Charlie stared down at his shoes, scuffing the soles across the soft give of the grey floor. He would have preferred the toddler to the red suit; that shade made his teeth ache.

  He frowned and prodded the floor again. The last time he’d been on the tube, the train had stopped dead in the middle of a tunnel, surrounding them with tints of black, an ebony hand clutching at them until he’d thought his heart would burst. The floor hadn’t been soft then; had in fact left a cross-hatching of vicious welts through his jeans and jersey and the back of his hands where he’d cowered against it, sobbing, while Chrissie pretended not to know him and the rest of carriage stared in bemused disgust.

  Charlie pushed down once more with the toe of his high-laced sneaker, and watched the floor eddy gently around the pressure.

  He was leaning forward to touch it when the lights flickered and went out.

  Six

  It was only a split-second, not even enough time to draw breath for a scream, but Charlie froze, clutching Donald in a death grip; heart pounding up into his throat as he scanned the carriage frantically, looking for a pair of molten-copper eyes.

  The teenage girls continued their squawking without a hitch, the noise fluttering brightly down the length of the carriage in shrieks and giggles.

  Shaking her head primly, the woman in the trouser suit tugged a tortoiseshell compact from her handbag and checked her lipstick, sucking loudly and repetitively at her teeth.

  Charlie watched in awed fascination as she flicked a tongue the colour of raw liver over the yellowing ivory and sucked again.

  The carriage lurched and growled, crawling out of the tunnel and jolting to a stop at the platform with an impatient hiss, echoed by the punk as he leapt to his feet and shambled towards the doors.

  Seconds later the train shook itself and started trotting along once more, with the punk still waiting for the doors to open.

  “Hey!” He bellowed, hammering and kicking at the heavy glass.

  Charlie flinched and buried his face in Donald’s back. Hey was fury and raw, unreasoning hatred. Hey meant pushes and slaps and pinches in the street.

  “Aw, fucksake!”He turned away, aiming a last furious kick at the unmoving door, and threw himself into the nearest seat, chewing sulkily on the metal imbedded in his lower lip.

  That thick, meaty stench filled the air again, and Charlie struggled not to gag.

  With a triumphant howl the train rushed into the darkness of the tunnel, the lights beginning to flicker once more. Charlie whimpered deep in his throat, and rammed his fingers deep into Donald’s body, fondling the solid plastic of the inhaler as his throat and lungs began threatening eminent closure.

  A swift slap of blackness and the lights came on again, pulsing as fast as Charlie’s wildly racing heart, and that stench rose in time with the lights, a heavy, bloody olfactory assault that made Charlie clamp his hand over his mouth and nose and hiccup softly against his own thick-calloused palm.

  The punk was gone, only a sticky damp place and a silver stud left on the material of the seat. After a few moments of the passengers staring at each other, the elderly man stood up and shuffled cautiously over to where the boy had sat.

  As he bent over the material and gingerly dabbed a finger at it, the train loped easily through the next station without hesitating at the platform.

  Charlie had a vague impression of puzzled faces that blurred past in a wash of fluorescent tubing and dirty white walls.

  “This is blood,” the man in the skullcap whispered. His voice was soft and whispery, but blood in that voice still sounded like the dull, leaden thud of crumpling metal to Charlie, who gasped and clapped his hand over his ears.

  The teenagers had fallen silent instantly, clutching each other and huddling together like terrified doves.

  “It can’t be.” The woman in the red suit sat upright and peered at him accusingly, as the lights began to flicker and hum once more.

  “There is something seriously wrong here,” the man continued in that papery soft voice, holding his scarlet-smeared fingers towards them as the shadows behind him shivered and coalesced.

  Charlie started to weep as he watched the copper sparks float in the dimness behind the old man.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and the red woman jerked around to glare at him.

  “What –“ she began, and the carriage shuddered violently and flung the man in the skullcap against the beating yellow vessel of the central pole. He slid down it gracelessly, one arm out flung like a drunken ballerina, and the girls, still clutching each, other, began to shriek in unpretty scales of terror.

  He touched the floor and was gone, melting into the surface like a puddle of aging human snow.

  The carriage belched explosively and raced on.

  The red woman staggered to her feet, cawing speechlessly.

  She dropped her handbag, still open, onto the floor; the tortoiseshell compact spilled out and shattered shards of pattern across the hideous lipstick, the coins, the used, crumpled tissue dappled with make-up and middle-aged snot.

  She stumbled and fell heavily to her knees, crawling the short length of passageway between the seats. As she brushed against the legs of the girls, they flinched away from her and redoubled the volume of shrieking.

  The lights flickered and hummed like a million flies.

  Charlie fumbled the torch out of Donald’s back and hit the switch as the lights dimmed away once more, in time to see the red lady crawl head first into Danny’s knees.

  He lifted her easily to her feet, patted her gently on the shoulder, and carved an extra smile with his thumbnail below the trembling efforts of her own lips before flopping her bonelessly into a waiting seat.

  Charlie felt his throat shut and his bladder open, and scrambled once more inside Donald for the ugly saviour of gas and plastic.

  The first pinpricks of oxygen starvation flared across his eyeballs; little stars of light that burned across his eyes and exploded into lethal beauty.

  In his haste he dropped the torch from rapidly numbing fingers, the falling flare enough to see Danny loom up before the sobbing teenage girls and slam their skulls together with brisk efficiency. The torch landed with a sickening crunch on the floor of the carriage and died forever.

  Charlie wheezed and forced the last of the gas in the inhaler down his throat, panting and gasping and sobbing as the swollen tissue finally subsided.

  The lights flared back on, bright as the desert sun. The bodies were gone.

  Danny was sitting cross-legged on the seat opposite him, smiling. The copper rounds that had pierced his eyes gleamed and winked obscenely as the train screamed through the tunnels, a mortar on the final arc of descent.

  Charlie felt his chest crushed in a vice grip. Nerveless fingers dropped the empty, useless grey tube to the floor.

  “Hey Charlie,” Danny whispered, leaning forward and bringing the scent of open bowels and over-ripe meat with him. “Want to play a game?”

  As the train howled and farted towards the next stop, the lights buzzed and hummed and let the darkness in once more.

  This time, it stayed for quite a while.

  Pushing Janey

  One

  Phan sa
w her for the first time at Piccadilly Station, waiting to cram into the can with the rest of the sardines at five o’clock.

  Like dozens of others, she stood scanning a book, nibbling on a strand of blonde hair, glancing up every so often at passers by.

  Usually, he dropped his eyes when someone looked up, but he was slow today – it had been a long eight hours in the ledgers and his mind had been wandering over irreconcilable figures.